{"id":5387,"date":"2014-09-23T19:14:35","date_gmt":"2014-09-23T11:14:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/?p=5387"},"modified":"2023-01-24T14:11:47","modified_gmt":"2023-01-24T13:11:47","slug":"focusing-on-communication-to-learn-chinese","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/focusing-on-communication-to-learn-chinese\/","title":{"rendered":"Focusing on communication to learn Chinese"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>There are many people who advocate a very hands-on approach to language learning, urging us to simply use the language as much as possible and let learning (acquisition) take place along the way. They focus mostly on communication and very little on form.<\/p>\n

This approach works, but it’s a lot harder for Chinese than for languages closely related to your native language (check what Scott Young said<\/a> after his adventure in China after learning French, Spanish and Portuguese, for example). In order to be able to communicate in a language, you need certain basic knowledge, which takes somewhat longer to acquire in Chinese.<\/p>\n

It’s all about efficiency<\/h3>\n

However, the main question I want to discuss in this article isn’t if it works or not, it’s how good the approach is and if there might be better ways of doing it. The reason I don’t really care about if something just works or not is that (almost) anything works if you spend enough time. Let’s look at vocabulary acquisition as an example:<\/p>\n

You can learn characters and words without studying at all, but you’re going to forget most of what you learn unless you spend an awful lot of time using the language.<\/p>\n

If it takes you ten minutes to learn a word, you’re not using a very good method. If you forget 50% of what you learn, it’s probably not a good method either. Just to give you an example, learning a character or a word might only take a minute or two if that time is spread out over time and spaced properly (the average time for learning an item in Skritter<\/a> is just below one minute, for instance).<\/p>\n

The point is that here on Hacking Chinese, I’m concerned with how well something works, how efficient it is. I’ve written more about this here: Learning efficiently vs. learning quickly<\/a>. Now, let’s get back to learning Chinese through communication. As we shall see, the problem isn’t really that communication isn’t a good way of learning, it’s that it’s hard to do it enough for it to work properly!<\/p>\n

Focusing on communication as a beginner<\/h3>\n

As a beginner, it’s very hard to spend enough time on communication with the limited amount of language you have learnt already. There are no endless sources of good listening and\/or reading material for you (although you can find a lot here<\/a>). If it’s extremely demanding for you to speak and write Chinese, you won’t be able to spend enough time to learn efficiently. You will burn yourself out or go crazy. This doesn’t really go away until you reach a level where you can understand Chinese written or spoken for a native audience, and speak Chinese for extended periods without tiring too much.<\/p>\n

If you focus only on communication, you run the risk of neglecting some aspects of Chinese that are actually very important. Let’s look at tones as an example. You might argue that if tones are really important for communication, you would learn them by practising communication, but as I have argued in another article<\/a>, this isn’t really the case.<\/p>\n

This is because as a beginner, you don’t really need tones to make yourself understood, the listener can probably guess what you want to say anyway because the possible things you can say are very limited based on the context and the fact that you’re obviously a beginner. This does not mean that tones are not important for communication!<\/p>\n

The same can be said about many other areas of Chinese, such as writing characters, pronunciation in general and perhaps also grammar and word choice.<\/p>\n

A balanced approach<\/h3>\n

I think communication is the essence of languages and also of language learning. Way too many people, especially in foreign language classrooms around the world, spend too little time actually communicating in the language they’re learning, not too much! I don’t want anyone to interpret this article as a call for less communication in general.<\/p>\n

Communication is great for a number of reasons:<\/p>\n